PARIS: BIGGEST EVER
First report, illustrated mainly with "Flight" photographs and drawings
PARIS '67 is BIGGER AND WETTER, but it's the mixture as before.Largely encompassed by, on one hand, the full-scale Card-board Concorde, and on the other a lath-and-plaster X-15, it
is at once the most international and intensely nationalistic of
airshows. The pattern follows 1965—with the Russians concentrat-
ing on civil aircraft and space; the Americans on military aircraft
and space; ever more helicopters and fleets of light types. But in the
whole vast gallimaufry of tightly parked aircraft, in the sprawling
exhibition halls and national pavilions and the serried ranks of
chalets de reception, there is not one surprise and little that is
entirely new. Before the question is asked, the answer is no—the
Russian SST has not darkened the Le Bourget sky so far.
The Concorde mock-up, a thing of gleaming grace and beauty,
deservedly dominates the static park, with the Vostok space
vehicle earning great attention too. The Concorde could be said to
have performed its first public service last weekend when beneath
its wings it sheltered an ogive crowd from the torrential rain which
made Friday and Sunday days of soggy misery. (The An-22, with
high-aspect ratio, high-mounted wings, was an indifferent umbrella).
Reports of a dispute as to whether a Frenchman or a Briton should
he the apex of the crowd so formed are probably apocryphal, but
they serve to emphasise the nationalistic tensions which develop in
the hothouse atmosphere of the Salon. If rampant dispute is not
evident in the Concorde context, and even though BAC and
freguet radiate apparently sincere sweetness and light about the
jaguar, collaboration is not the message of this show. While
British firms generally emphasise it—to an excessive extent, perhaps,
with Westland and others having their stand captions only in
French—the French companies, with the exception of Breguet, pay
scant regard to it. In particular, last Saturday's unveiling, at Melun-
Villaroche of the Mirage G swing-wing aircraft (when the AFVGw
*s not even mentioned until British journalists raised the question),
together with the appearance on the Dassault stand of a private-
venture Mirage G development offered as a naval alternative to
AFVG, make the prospects for this ostensibly BAC/Dassault
partnership look increasingly bleak. -
In 1965 the kudos in the pop publicity stakes went to the USSR,
with the appearance of the gross and unexciting An-22. This year,
the Concorde mock-up and Lockheed's gleaming civil StarLifter
(which, with its civil Hercules stablemate and the Super Guppy, are
the only heavy US commercial aircraft present) diminish the An-22.
But the Soviet publicity coup in 1965 has resulted in the US mount-
ing an integrated national display for the first time ever at such
a show.
The approach to the US pavilion is via "Mock-up Mile". This
begins beneath a model of the Jefferson Memorial Arch, which
spans a flying replica of Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and passes,
on the left, the flags of most nations and, on the right, a pictorial
presentation of the development of aviation and space exploration.
It then passes the mock-up X-15 and enters the cool, dark passages
of the US national exhibit. All honour to the States, in this most
chauvinistic of shows, for emphasising the universality of aviation;
the collection of flags really does include the hammer and sickle,
the outside walls of the US pavilion carry the names of the world's
great air pioneers; and the pictorial progression clearly shows the
Comet 1 as the world's first commercial jet airliner, and Sputnik 1
as the first artificial satellite.
Heading picture: Symbolising both the nationalism and the interna-
tionalism of the show, the full-scale aluminium-skinned replica of the
Concorde is furnished and open to the public. Its realism might even
deceive an engineer, and its grace impresses everyone